Tomás de Torquemada

Spanish religious leader

• Born: 1420
• Birthplace: Torquemada, near Valladolid, Castile (now in Spain)
• Died: September 16, 1498
• Place of death: Ávila, Spain

Torquemada was the most prominent religious leader in shaping the Spanish Inquisition, which led ultimately to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.

Early Life

Tomás de Torquemada (toh-MAHS day tawr-kay-MAH-dah) was born in the small town of Torquemada (a name derived from the Latin phrase torre cremata, burnt tower), in northern Castile. The only son of the nobleman Pero Fernández de Torquemada, Tomás was a nephew of Juan de Torquemada, cardinal of San Sisto, who had gained a reputation among his contemporaries for his theological works, including early defenses of the doctrines of papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception.

Little is known of Tomás’s early life. While still a boy, he entered the Dominican order, later taking his vows at the Convent of St. Paul in Valladolid. He completed a doctorate in philosophy and divinity, soon gaining a reputation both for his scholarship and for the extreme austerity in which he lived. For the rest of his life, Torquemada never ate meat or permitted linen to be used in either his clothing or bedding. As a means of mortifying his flesh, he wore a rough hair shirt against his skin regardless of the weather and denied himself even the slightest appearance of luxury. This asceticism was extended even to other members of his family. After his father died and his sister came of age, Torquemada limited her, his sole surviving close relative, to a dowry no larger than that sufficient to permit entrance into the Tertiary Order of Dominican nuns.

The grave and austere young Torquemada soon came to the attention of his superiors, and in 1452, he became prior of the Dominican monastery of Santa Cruz in Segovia. It is possible that this would have been the extent of his rise to power had he not been given the opportunity to serve as confessor to the Castilian monarch Isabella I in 1474. Five years earlier, Isabella had married Ferdinand of Aragon, and together these two monarchs ruled kingdoms that would become the core of the modern nation of Spain. As confessor to Isabella, and soon to Ferdinand as well, Torquemada obtained precisely the right position in which to have a profound impact on the direction that Spanish religion would take throughout the early years of the Renaissance.

Life’s Work

In 1482, as Torquemada was supervising the construction of a new monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the city of Ávila, he was informed that Ferdinand’s campaign against the Moors near the city of Loja was about to fail. The king’s army was suffering from disease, and supplies of both food and weapons were running low. Torquemada immediately ordered that twenty-four pitchers be filled with gold he had painstakingly acquired to pay for the fabric and vestments of his new monastery. These pitchers were then covered with a layer of cloth and leaves and carried by mule to Isabella. Torquemada’s instructions were that the queen should use the gold in whatever way might best assist the king in his siege of Loja. Torquemada’s gold arrived too late to be of much use; the siege had to be lifted and the army recalled. Nevertheless, the young priest’s swift action proved his loyalty to the crown in a manner that would soon be repaid by Ferdinand and Isabella.

In 1483, conservative elements of the Church, alarmed by tales (many of them false) of Jewish converts to Christianity who had reverted to their ancestral faith or lapsed into heretical doctrines, persuaded Pope Sixtus IV to reorganize a board of inquisition that had been established in Spain five years earlier. This original board had taken a largely passive role, lending support to a plan of Cardinal Mendoza, the archbishop of Seville, to combat instances of heresy through the issuance of a new catechism. Now, with papal blessing and the strong support of Isabella the conservative faction saw to it that Torquemada was appointed the first inquisitor general of Castile on October 2, 1483. Fifteen days later, Torquemada’s appointment was also extended into Aragon. Torquemada’s Dominican order, the Order of Preachers most fervently devoted to combating heresy, remained in charge of the Inquisition for the rest of its history. In 1487, Pope Innocent VIII expanded Torquemada’s position still further by appointing him grand inquisitor of all Spain.

In theory, the newly reorganized Inquisition was charged only with investigating Christians who were accused of unorthodox views. It was never intended to prosecute unconverted Jews or even to punish Christians who were guilty of heresy. The stated goal of the Inquisition was to return sinners to the “true faith” and, if this proved impossible, to surrender them to the Spanish government for “condign punishment” (a phrase used for “appropriate penalties” that were supposed to be merciful and to stop short of injury, torture, or death). In reality, however, the Spanish Inquisition was responsible for as many as two thousand deaths by fire, the imprisonment of at least one hundred thousand people, countless acts of torture and, indirectly, the expulsion of all Jews from Spain.

Torquemada’s procedure was to investigate any charge of heresy made by two or more witnesses. The accused were informed of the charges against them and, if they were reluctant to confess, threatened with torture. Often this threat alone was enough to compel a confession; if the defendant refused to cooperate, however, Torquemada permitted the use of force. The most common torture used by the Spanish Inquisition was the rack and water torture, in which a long cloth was forced down the throat of the accused person and then drenched in water, which led to choking and near drowning.

Those who were found guilty of the charges brought against them could be fined, have their property confiscated, or be forced to undergo a public penance before being surrendered to the government for further punishment. True to his ascetic habits, Torquemada kept none of the goods confiscated for himself but used them both to advance his religious order and to enrich the government’s coffers. Ferdinand, whose religious zealotry seems to have been less intense than Isabella’s, was attracted to the Inquisition at least as much for its economic advantages as for its suppression of heresy.

Once in the hands of the state, the most recalcitrant of the convicted largely former Jews found guilty of false conversion were subjected to a highly public final punishment. Though the Inquisition always kept true to its charge by making a perfunctory request that the state show mercy, the convicted were usually executed. In a public spectacle known as the auto-da-fé (Portuguese for act of the faith), victims were subjected to a lengthy sermon detailing their faults, led in a procession to the place of execution (during which they were often dressed in the sanbenito, a yellow tunic specially revived by Torquemada that was emblazoned with images of infernal torment), bound, and burned at the stake, with the burning wood occasionally dampened to prolong their agony. In extreme cases, before the fires were lit, the bodies of the victims were torn by pincers or otherwise mutilated. Those convicted in absentia were sometimes burned in effigy, a symbol of the fate awaiting them if they ever returned to Spanish territory.

Torquemada’s first auto-da-fé (burning of a heretic) took place in May, 1485, with a second following in June. Later that same year, the deaths of Torquemada’s fellow inquisitors, Pedro Arbues and Gaspar Juglar Arbues was assassinated and Juglar died of illness, though his death widely suspected at the time to be the result of poisoning led the Inquisition to be even more severe in its oppression of Jewish converts to Christianity. In 1486, Saragossa was the site of no fewer than fourteen autos-da-fé, with forty-two victims executed and an additional 134 imprisoned, flogged, or subjected to public penance. Those who were convicted of Arbues’s murder were castrated and had their hands cut off before they were hung; while still alive, they were cut down from the gibbet and killed by having their bodies quartered and burned.

Torquemada’s reputation as a religious figure grew after he predicted a dire fate for the king of Naples. The grand inquisitor had been attempting to prosecute a political appointee of Ferrantino, king of Naples, when the pope agreed to a special dispensation protecting the accused. A Neapolitan ambassador presented Torquemada with the documents, which he accepted only after remarking that he would now need to contact Rome so as to be certain that the papers were genuine. When the ambassador expressed shock at such an insult, Torquemada replied that he had a greater right to be amazed, as the king of Naples wished to protect a heretic. “In any case,” Torquemada is reported to have continued, “it matters little, since Ferrantino will soon die without an heir.” Remarkably, Ferrantino’s only son did die soon thereafter, and, at the king’s death, the throne of Naples passed to his uncle.

Perhaps the most infamous prosecution undertaken by Torquemada was the so-called La Gardia (or La Guardia) Trial of 1490-1491. Torquemada was informed that, in a travesty of Good Friday, a four-year-old Christian boy had been crucified by false Jewish converts to Christianity. A lengthy investigation began, and it is unclear whether the confessions that were finally received resulted from exhaustion following extensive torture or an actual instance of necromantic rite. In any case, eight converted Jews were burned. Three who repented at the last moment were strangled as a sign of mercy. Three others who had cheated the executioner by their earlier deaths were burned in effigy. Two Jews implicated in the plot were tortured and then burned. The crucified four-year-old boy, who may never have existed at all, was later canonized as San Cristobal, or the santo niño (holy infant) of La Gardia.

The public outcry resulting from the La Gardia Trial led to the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Shortly thereafter, Torquemada resigned his positions as grand inquisitor and royal confessor. He spent the rest of his life overseeing the monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Ávila, and he died peacefully after receiving the last rites of the Catholic Church in September, 1498.

Significance

Without the persistence of Torquemada, the Spanish Inquisition might never have occurred. At the very least, Torquemada must be held accountable for the brutality of many of the prosecutions undertaken by the Inquisition. Although many have argued that other courts of the day, whether religious or secular, resorted to torture and summary judgment even more frequently than that established by Torquemada, the grand inquisitor’s single-minded hatred of Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, the torture of thousands, and the impoverishment of numerous others.

So completely did the Inquisition rid Torquemada’s country of opposition to Catholic orthodoxy that Spain was almost the only nation in Europe unaffected by the Reformation during the 1500’s. Torquemada’s legacy was to leave Spain arguably the most homogeneously Catholic country in Europe, a status that may have led to later conflicts, including the launch of the unsuccessful Spanish Armada against England in the summer of 1588.

Bibliography

Anderson, James M. Daily Life During the Spanish Inquisition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Part of the Daily Life Through History series, this book surveys the effects of the Inquisition on every aspect of mundane existence, from the royal court to rural farming communities, from military life to the daily experience of students. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Hope, Thomas. Torquemada: Scourge of the Jews. London: Allen & Unwin, 1939. A concise introduction for the general reader. Marred by a few strained comparisons of Torquemada and the Inquisition to Hitler and Nazism.

Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Attempts to argue that the Inquisition was neither as widely accepted nor as cruel as is generally believed. While accepting the judgment that the Inquisition had disastrous and brutal effects on the Jewish population, Kamen argues that it was not an all-powerful instrument of terror and domination, and that other nations of the time in fact used torture more frequently and malevolently. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Longhurst, John Edward. The Age of Torquemada. Lawrence, Kans.: Coronado Press, 1964. A short survey both of Torquemada’s life and of the principal events of his period.

Paris, Erna. The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995. This history of the Inquisition discusses Torquemada’s use of the Holy Child of La Gardia Trial to motivate the expulsion of the Jews. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Pérez Galdós, Benito. Torquemada. Translated by Frances M. Lopez-Morillas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Unquestionably the most thorough source on Torquemada. Suited primarily to the advanced academic reader.

Roth, Norman. Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Study of the experience of the Jews under the Inquisition, especially those who attempted to convert to Catholicism. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Sabatini, Rafael. Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition: A History. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1924. A still-useful source that has the advantage of providing information on the history of the Inquisition both before and after Torquemada and the disadvantage of a flowery, tendentious style.

Whitechapel, Simon. Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. London: Creation, 2003. A somewhat sensational and one-sided but informative portrayal of Torquemada and the horrors of the Inquisition. Includes bibliographic references.